Craiggers: The better way to search Craigslist

News about Craiggers first started hitting my radar in early May when ReadWriteWeb wrote about the website. Craiggers is a website that lets you search through Craigslist more efficiently using a better, cleaner interface. “Big deal, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel” you ask? Good question. That is exactly what I thought when I first heard about the service.

Thanks to Twitter, however, I have been getting constant reminders about Craiggers popping up in my social stream each week, and every single person who mentions it, raves about it.

So, I had to give Craiggers another look and I’ve come to the conclusion the fandemonium seems justified. It’s full of features you wished you had for years, but didn’t realize it.

So here are my top 5 reasons why this service is better than using Craigslist:

The interface is dead simple to use, and looks good. While Craigslist has won the Internet for being a simple, reliable resource to find stuff, it’s never won any points for its design. Craiggers’ design breeds better usability.

Items for sale can be viewed in a stream, similar to updates you see on Facebook or Twitter, with thumbnail photos and basic details visible on a single screen. I find this style of browsing easier to read and more efficient in getting to good content quickly.

There are more, and better, filters to sort results. Sort by price (Craigslist also lets you do this), but you can also sort by date of posting, low to high (price), relevancy and more and the results all populate on one page. You can also change your search parameters without having to click forward or back or without having to open multiple tabs.

You can save searches. Anyone who has been on the market for something but wanted to take their time to find it will appreciate this feature. Rather than having to visit Craigslist and type in your search query over and over each day, you can save your search and watch for updates. There is also an email notification feature where you get sent updates by email related to your search.

You can set a favourites list so if you’re looking for something over a period of a few days, this acts as a bookmark so you don’t have to email yourself a bunch of links as a reminder.